"A National Party No More"  by Zell Miller

The Conscience of Zell Miller ...

The polls keep telling politicians that most voters, Democratic and Republican,  support President Bush in the war against terrorism, they want their taxes lowered, they want some restraints on abortion, they want judges who follow the Constitution instead of making up new laws, and they don't want their children's education hijacked by power-crazy labor unions.  

In his latest book, A National Party No More, Zell Miller insists that while Republicans have also been guilty of ignoring voters on these issues, Democratic Party leaders in Washington are now bought and paid for by special interest groups which oppose the American majority on almost every agenda. He describes the U.S.Senate Democrats' weekly caucus meetings where marching orders from 'The Groups' are passed on to the Senators, sometimes called in during the meetings, no debate allowed, just vote as ordered and the money will flow. The Democrats demand one hundred percent adherence to the party line, with no diversity of opinion allowed.  Which is why he stopped attending the weekly luncheon caucuses.

Zell says he was taught "Take what you want. Take it and pay for it...Everything has a price."  Democrats in Washington vote as directed and get the money and the vote-getting activities, but the penalty being exacted is a "fragmented" party that can't endure. He tells the story of a long-ago
North Carolina governor who the Whigs hoped could revive their party. The governor told them "The party is dead and buried and the tombstone placed over it and I don't care to spend the rest of my days mourning at its grave."  That is the fate Zell sees ahead for the Democratic Party because it has cut itself off from its Thomas Jefferson roots and veered hard Left -- an ideology rooted in the French, not the American Revolution.

Miller's descripton of the current crop of Democratic campaigners for the presidential nomination is reminiscent of the story in "Farwalker", a children's book by Larry Leonard about lemmings.  The title character is a young lemming who becomes alarmed by the hysteria leading his tribe to the cliff's edge, and who has the backbone to pull himself and some others to safety.  Zell notes that many young people today are conservative in their political and cultural views and are not impressed by a party that is willing, for example, to put the lives of millions of Americans at risk in order to satisfy demands from civil service union bosses. Though he isn't young, it is Zell who is the 'Farwalker' in this book, attempting to warn his party away from disaster.

A focus for Senator Miller is his beloved South, which he says the Democratic Party leadership views as a "foreign country." In fact, it sounds as though they consider not only the South but most of the rest of the nation as backward, oblivious natives who are easily lured by periodic offerings of
cynical attention and empty promises of an easy life -- and who don't notice that their pockets are being picked clean. According to Zell Democratic leaders   need to listen more to their constituents back home, they need to work with Republicans in Congress and be ready to compromise when the safety of the nation is at stake. They need to remember that they are the servants of the general public, not the mouthpieces for various, often conflicting, organized mobs.

Miller has been serving the public, mostly in his home state of Georgia, for over forty years. He describes those years and the accomplishments he is most proud of, as well as some decisions he is not so proud of. He has changed his mind, for example, about abortion, from supporting Roe vs Wade to acknowledging that abortion is not "a political issue but a moral one."  He compares the 1972 Supreme Court ruling on abortion to its 1857 ruling that slaves were the "property" of their owners. He quotes and agrees with Sean Hannity in his book, Let Freedom Ring: "The Constitution stands for neither slavery nor abortion and yet in order to reach their conclusions, the justices in both cases had to treat human life as if it were something else."
 
Throughout the book Miller gives us fascinating glimpses of his personal roots in rural Georgia, of his fierce, loving and independent mother who was widowed young, and of the rural Georgians who value their votes very highly and make politicians work hard to get them. Because he supports President Bush, especially on education and the war on terrorism, and often votes with
Republicans in Congress, Republican leaders have offered him everything but the moon to switch parties. But Zell says being a Democrat is in his DNA, he'll never make that switch. It doesn't matter. His values are traditional American values, shared not only by Georgians but by people across the entire nation, whether they are registered Democratic or Republican. He is a
politician who has refused to kill off his conscience, and who cares enough for his party to  go public with warnings about the destruction it races toward.

                                                 --- Peggy Whitcomb

© 2003 Peggy Whitcomb